Right now I'm on Mac OS El Capitan, but I do have the download for Sierra. Should I go directly to High Sierra or to Sierra? I'm concerned about performance issues that I've been reading about on Safari with the beachballs on High Sierra. However, I was reading those forums about that issue during last year.
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Would you recommend upgrading MacBook Air 2015 to High Sierra?
- Thread starter jtsang777
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No ..No ..No keep reading all the good posts on EC, I am trying to go back now on my MBP..
My early 2015 air and early 2014 air have been running High Sierra with no issues for a while. Both have i5’s, one with 8gb of ram and a 256ssd, and the other with 4gb of ram, and a 128ssd. Have not noticed a slow down or beachball issue. Had some early issues with Preview (cut and paste, formatting, etc.), but after a few OS updates seems to be cleared up.
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El Capitan is good for security updates until v14 is released. I would wait until High Sierra is complete this summer then do a clean install of High Sierra. Clone your drive then boot from the clone, erase your internal drive and install High Sierra. The installer will reformat your SSD drive as APFS.
High Sierra and Sierra has you Mac swapping quite quickly with only 4GB. I’d stick with El Cap until it is insupported.
I did... no issues to report... works well for my purposes.
1.6 GHz Core i5 processor
8 GM RAM
256GM SSD
Would you say the performance of High Sierra is equal to or faster than El Capitan?
Yes. I don't to anything extremely taxing... very little, light weight FCPx, some Photoshop... mostly web surfing and some word processing... record some stuff with GarageBand... it works at least as well as El Cap, at least in my experience.
Depends on your risk/reward. El Cap is the most mature support Mac OS while High Sierra has a lot of issues depending on who you talk to. I always run the latest build myself which is 10.13.3 but there's nothing really new in that most users would find in their general use.
El Cap is a fine version of the OS, I intend to stick with it indefinitely on both my 2012 Mini and 2015 MBPro. Absolutely no plans to "move further forward" -- I see at least two more years on El Cap for me, possibly more.
Be aware that quite a few folks who "moved up" to High Sierra have had problems with it.
This doesn't mean that YOU will have problems with it.
But... you might.
In that case, "going back" could be problematical if you don't "prepare yourself" before taking the plunge.
What I would recommend (short version):
1. Before trying High Sierra (or even Low Sierra), make a BOOTABLE CLONED BACKUP of your existing El Cap setup on an external drive. CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper will do this quickly and easily. I like CCC because it clones the recovery partition as well.
Both CCC and SD are FREE to download and use for 30 days.
If you have a bootable cloned backup, and don't like HS, it will be child's play to "get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged".
If you DON'T have a cloned backup, you can still get back, but it WON'T be "easy".
2. Do the install FROM A USB FLASH DRIVE --- NOT from the Mac hard drive itself (or from "internet recovery").
Things seem to go better this way.
You need an 8gb or 16gb USB flashdrive and the free little app called "Boot Buddy":
Boot Buddy – sqwarq
Takes only a few minutes and a few mouse clicks to create it.
Be aware that quite a few folks who "moved up" to High Sierra have had problems with it.
This doesn't mean that YOU will have problems with it.
But... you might.
In that case, "going back" could be problematical if you don't "prepare yourself" before taking the plunge.
What I would recommend (short version):
1. Before trying High Sierra (or even Low Sierra), make a BOOTABLE CLONED BACKUP of your existing El Cap setup on an external drive. CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper will do this quickly and easily. I like CCC because it clones the recovery partition as well.
Both CCC and SD are FREE to download and use for 30 days.
If you have a bootable cloned backup, and don't like HS, it will be child's play to "get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged".
If you DON'T have a cloned backup, you can still get back, but it WON'T be "easy".
2. Do the install FROM A USB FLASH DRIVE --- NOT from the Mac hard drive itself (or from "internet recovery").
Things seem to go better this way.
You need an 8gb or 16gb USB flashdrive and the free little app called "Boot Buddy":
Boot Buddy – sqwarq
Takes only a few minutes and a few mouse clicks to create it.